Web Site Traffic Tips

I’ve been waffling between using the “www” on my new site and not using it and a colleague told me that’s a problem with the search engine. She said I need to set the “preferred domain” in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT). How do I do that?

I’ve been working with a local kid on improving my search engine ranking and while it was going well for a while, my site seems to be getting less and less traffic in the last month or two. That’s not right! He told me that I could look in my Google Webmaster Tools area to find out if there are any specific flagged problems, but frankly I kinda think he did some bad things and don’t want his help. I do, however, want to look and see if there are any problems, I just have no idea where that information can be found in Webmaster Tools. Help!

I’m excited that a local book author wants me to host a giveaway for her book on my blog. Cool. I’ve seen other people do it. But how? Is there a good tool or utility that’ll make it easy for me to collect entries and even maybe get a few new people to like my fan page on Facebook?

I don’t like to have any problems or errors on my site so I’m constantly checking Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and am a bit confused about how to find and fix broken links. Can you give a quick tutorial?

I noticed your have a meetup.com group of your own, Dave, so I thought I’d ask you: I want to ask a few companies to be sponsors of my meetup group and am curious how to add a sponsor within meetup.com so that everyone who visits the group page sees their logo and can click through to their site? I have seen it on other meetup.com group pages.

I saw you had an article on how to Add someone to your google analytics account but, um, that’s out of date, Dave, and is no longer helpful. Now, today, February 2013, can you write a new article that shows how to grant a colleague access to a Google Analytics account without them being able to tweak or change things?

If you’re a content producer, you should already be creating and posting videos on YouTube. With millions of searches every hour, and billions of videos viewed weekly, it’s another important place to attain visibility for your company, products and services.
But how do you know whether people like your videos? Sure, there’s the view counter and there’s a like/dislike indicator, but those are crude and almost pointless because someone who watches four seconds of your video and bails is counted identically to the next viewer who watches the video all the way through and visits your Web site immediately thereafter.
Turns out that the team at YouTube know this and have some pretty interesting analytics built into the video hosting service that offer a lot more insight. Let’s have a look…

Dave, I have several businesses that I do their websites for, but they want me to submit them to Google Places. Unfortunately, Google needs the owner of the business to obtain a ‘pin’ that is used to verify business ownership. Do you know of a way I can obtain those pins for my clients?